I thought it was actually just a bunch of desperate comedians ripping off Jonathan Swift. I guess 21st century "culture jamming" is 18th century pamphleteering with more jargon and less literature.

I don't think that's a very insightful approach to early national culture. You might want to look at the first chapter of Robert Ferguson's Law and Letters in American Culture, Michael Kammen's Machine That Would Go Of Itself and Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution for three very different approaches to making some better and more productive conceptions.

and their images and personas continue to move units in the commercial and political spheres today. Inseparable from them are pre-Manifest Destiny era ideas of self-righteousness and entitlement,

Is that "Federalism" or something else? I don't understand.

and institutionalized racism, which both permeated the roots of American property law and the Constitution.

I think you mean "and slavery".

In 1915, the American Celebrity had changed. Early that year, The Birth of a Nation debuted to soaring reviews and box office records. Arnold would say Americans look to a single event, a sudden birth of a nation. Perhaps, but surely new heroes are born. In 1915, industry was transforming the world, and men like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were public figures of the day. Teddy Roosevelt’s U.S. didn’t want conflict hurting production, and it would take two years after the sinking of the Lusitania for the U.S. to enter the war.

This makes it sound as though Theodore Roosevelt was in favor of peace in order to maintain production. That's wrong. TR left office in March 1909, and in 1912 he sought reelection to the Presidency against his own chosen successor, WH Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, as the candidate of the Bull Moose Party. He was not, needless to say, the winner. From the moment Germany invaded France and Belgium in 1914, TR began screaming for war, using it as an issue against Wilson, but more deeply from his inherent militarism and belief in society at its highest mobilized and ordered around by its government. Leaders like TR became altogether too common later in the 20th century: he was a man before his time. Wilson, on the other hand, fought his reelection campaign in 1916 on a peace platform, then immediately committed America to the war effort once the campaign was over.

I don't understand this comment. You think Jim Crow was a system of burdensome expense to railroad companies, all that having to separate the white people from the Negroes? You seem to be assuming that separation was created solely in a bureaucratic way, by passport-checking.

But that doesn’t mean people can or will forget about it. Arnold says new organizations rise to fill the gaps left by an older order. Hyper-exploitation today “happens” to be racist; 40% of Hispanics over 25 do not have a high school diploma, and the same percentage of prisoners in the U.S. are Black. But that’s a coincidence.

It isn't a coincidence, but you haven't said what it is.

New York recently raised $260 million by requiring citizens to purchase new license plates, which were made by prisoners paid $0.42 an hour.

But the traditional objectors to prison industries are unions, which believe that convict competition shouldn't be allowed to drive down wages. That's pointless in an economy were NY might otherwise buy license plates made in China by people who, as free workers, make about the same.

The overlap of crime, poverty, education deprivation and lack of job opportunities with race isn’t inevitable. It’s the clear result of actions spurred by words and propelled by ideologies ingrained within the institutions of our country.

Undoubtedly. But what relates that to the surrounding argument?

The Taney court was and is very much vilified, and probably with good reason. But perhaps Taney the individual is really a victim, merely the personification of an institution charged with jealously guarding a mythological power structure.

Perhaps? Is this a speculation based on nothing whatever, or are you actually suggesting that Roger Brooke Taney the actual person is somehow a victim of personifying the Supreme Court? His biographer, Carl Brent Swisher, also the author of a ponderous but thoughtful volume of the Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court on his term as Chief Justice, and of a book on Scott v. Sandford, might have been useful to consult. Look where you will, you find a vehement racist and no victim of anything. Among the most powerful and canny of the politicians around Jackson, more responsible than anyone other than Jackson for the Bank War, he stands before you in Scott as the intellectual center of proslavery Democracy.

In Dred Scot, the Taney Court, after pages of exasperatingly explaining how Blacks are historically inferior, rests finally on the authority of the Constitution. Look, it says. Racism is part of our ethos, our creed, our mythology. Its in our courts, its in our laws, its in our constitution of nationhood. And he was right, it was. Racism is one of the pillars of early American property law. It and other types of status discrimination based on gender, material wealth, and political influence form an overlapping foundation for the law which facilitated the most fundamental wealth redistribution in North America, that is, the redistribution of land from native "occupiers" to wealthy white male land owners. This legacy's effect on contemporary societal structures should be self-evident*.

If your proposition is that something about the nature of the United States required either that Scott not be entitled to present his claim to freedom on his own behalf in the federal courts, or made the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, what was that something? Racism? Are you seriously contending that another outcome of the legal issues in Scott was impossible because this was a racist empire? Then why was anybody dissenting? And what was the Republican Party complaining about? Not to mention John Brown and Henry David Thoreau?

Not very likely unless people are suddenly grown very stupid.

This paragraph doesn't make any sense to me. I would appreciate a restatement of its point.

Arnold admits that new organizations fill old roles. Progression of mythology takes place atop a foundation of stable underpinnings. Old roots wither and break or grow and prosper as the cultural landscape of the nation shifts, but veritable trunks still exist. Archetypes present continuing motifs from which fresh perspectives can carve new ideas, but the tumultuousness of creeds and mythologies throughout history have more in common than not. An authority exercises control, while an institution that embodies it simultaneously provides justification. This is Rome, this is the Catholic Church, the British Empire. This is how the Native Americans lost their land and Blacks became slaves. Like Taney, the individual is lost in the unconsciousness of the institution, but can choose to perpetuate it or not. Humanity is always the common element, and it will continue to check authority and underpin the mythology. It should not be allowed, however, to be appropriated as the personification of a justifying institution, and therefore become malleable to authority, as has been done with Kings and other Chieftains in countless societies, and with Corporations, Courts and the People in our own.

I don't understand what this means. I think most of the beginning asserts the constancy of change in society. I don't know what the second part means, because the reference to Taney seems wrong to me and everything else in the list is supposedly like that and so it's all very confusing. Could you just put what you mean in a sentence?

This is all very cute, but you'd have space if you made a disciplined argument, which would require an outline which would actually show a structure instead of striking literary poses. You're trying for high style before the skeleton is roughed out. We need to back up a couple of steps and start with a clear expression of the idea to be communicated, the sequence necessary to explain what it is, the consequences that follow from it and the conclusion to which it brings us. That will make it possible, without losing much when we lose the wrong or misleading history, etc., to put some of the style here to work on a sounder footing.